My Man Pendleton (25 page)

Pendleton scratched Maury behind his ears, and the puppy yawned with much gusto. "Why would your father send your brothers on your dates?"

"Simple," she said. "Because he knew the guys who asked me out were only after one thing."

Pendleton nodded knowingly. "Sex."

Kit shook her head. "Money."

He arched his eyebrows in astonishment, but said nothing in response to her assertion.

So Kit took it upon herself to state the obvious. "Well, why else would any of them want to go out with me?"

Strangely, he still seemed startled by her train of thought, because he replied, "Um, just a shot in the dark, here, but
…
maybe because they were attracted to you and wanted to get to know you better?"

She almost laughed at that. Almost. "Oh, right. Attracted to me. That's a good one."

"Well, why wouldn't they be?"

"Look, I'm not stupid," she said. "I know I'm not beautiful."

When he opened his mouth to comment, Kit stifled him with a quick wave of her hand. "You've never lied to me, Pendleton. And you're about the only person I know who hasn't. It's one of the things I admire about you. Don't start now."

Without uttering a sound, he closed his mouth.

Saddened by his honesty, Kit continued, "And I know I don't have the most tolerable personality, either. The only reason anyone asked me out was because of the Hensley millions. Hey, Daddy got Mama pregnant on purpose, just to get his hands on her money. There was no reason for him to think some guy wouldn't try the same thing with me."

For a long time, Pendleton gazed at her without speaking, studying her face, her eyes, her mouth. His scrutiny became so maddening, in fact, that Kit finally dropped her head to stare at the fingers she had tangled together in her lap. Why did he keep looking at her that way? He acted as if she were something worth looking at.

"If your father never gave you a chance to have a relationship with anyone," he finally began again, "then how did you get so far as a rehearsal dinner with the notorious Michael?"

Kit was surprised to discover that she didn't feel nearly as angry about the Michael Derringer incident now as she had before. Before her mother had put the fate of her family in her hands. Before she'd been offered the opportunity to extract a little revenge on her father. Before Pendleton had come along and made all kinds of funny things go jumping around inside her.

"I met Michael when I went away to Vanderbilt for my master's," she told him. "Daddy sent Dirk with me to do his doctoral studies, but I was old enough by then to have developed a few evasive maneuvers. Plus, Dirk was totally consumed by his studies and extremely easy to elude."

"You snuck out to meet with your beau."

She nodded. "Usually under cover of darkness. But there would be the few stolen moments in the library, and once or twice, I managed to make a frat party. Michael even scaled the side of my sorority house once when my roommate was out of town, just to be with me. It was all very romantic."

"Sounds like." For some reason, Pendleton's voice had gone a little rough around the edges. But before Kit could comment, he added, "And by 'be with me,' you mean…"

She laughed quietly. "Yes, Michael and I were lovers. I was twenty-three when I finally lost my virginity. Long overdue by some standards, don't you think?"

"Depends on your standards."

"Oh, really?" she retorted. "And how old were you when you lost your virginity, Mr. High Standards?"

He began to fidget, then leaped up from the floor and moved back toward his motorcycle. But he never answered her question.

"Well?" she demanded.

He glanced back over his shoulder sheepishly. "Um, I was, uh…"
He emitted a restless sound. "Fourteen."

"Fourteen?"
she asked incredulously. "You were having sex when you
were
fourteen?
Pendleton! Are you crazy? You could have been arrested for statutory!"

"Um, no I couldn't," he assured her. "Because she was, uh
…
she was eighteen."

"Eighteen?"
Kit sputtered.
"Eighteen?
Then
she
could have been arrested for statutory. Jeez, Pendleton, what were you? The Casanova of
South Jersey
?
Don
PendletJuan?"

"No," he said, obviously feeling defensive. "I was just an early beginner. Don't get so bent out of shape. It didn't happen again until I was sixteen."

"Oh, really? And how old was that one? Thirty-two?"

He arched a dark brow and threw her a salacious smile. "No, only twenty-one. Why? You jealous?"

"Oh, please. Spare me the details. But then," she hurried on, "we were talking about me, weren't we?"

"We always are."

She narrowed her eyes at that, then continued hastily, "When Michael proposed to me, I told him we should elope, because my father would only cause trouble. But Michael said I was entitled to a big, fancy white wedding, and he was going to see to it that I got one. At the time, I thought he was being terribly romantic and showing some real initiative. Later, I couldn't help but wonder if by making our relationship known to my family, he wasn't hoping for exactly the outcome he got."

"Kit, surely you don't think that he—"

"What I think," she interrupted him, her voice quiet, contemplative, and controlled, "is that I'll never be able to trust a man again." She unclenched her fingers only long enough to curl them tighter. "And that's why I can't forgive my father, Pendleton. Not because he paid Michael off. Hey, I knew all he wanted was my money. I knew he didn't love me. Like I said—I'm not stupid."

"Kit—"

"But I could at least
pretend
that he loved me, no matter who my family was or how much money they had. I could
dream
that it was me, not the Hensley millions, that he really cared about. Once Michael took that check and left the restaurant, though, that fantasy was gone forever."

"Kit—"

"So see, it isn't the fact that my father bribed and banished my fiancé that I can't forgive," she interrupted him again. "What I can't forgive is that by doing it, he robbed me of my dream. And
that
is why I will
not
get married before my mother's deadline. So that my father and brothers will know what it feels like to lose what's most important to them, just like I lost what was most important to me."
She met his gaze levelly. "They stole my fantasy, Pendleton. They stole my dreams."

Tears were beginning to well up in her eyes, and suddenly, she didn't want to talk to Pendleton anymore. So she pushed herself up from the floor, ignored Maury when he began to yip and bounce playfully around her feet, and stepped carefully over the puppy. Once she cleared that barrier, however, she realized another. Because Pendleton, too, had stood, and he'd placed himself between her and the door.

"Kit, listen to me. I—"

She held up her hands, chest-high, palm out. "Don't," she said simply, tilting her head back in an effort to keep the tears from spilling. "Just
…
don't."

Then she surged forward, shouldering him out of the way as she hurried past. And as she made tracks over the frosty grass in a bee-line back to the house, she congratulated herself on making an escape that was, if not particularly clean, at least complete.

Chapter 12

«
^
»

W
hat
ensued after that was a truce—of sorts—that lasted two full weeks. Well, not a truce exactly, because that suggested there were no displays of tension or pique, and that wasn't quite true. So it was really more like a status quo that lasted two weeks. Then again, it wasn't a status quo, either, because that smacked of politics, and although one might consider what went on between them to be political in a bizarre kind of way, wasn't really. So maybe what ensued was more like a sense of peace and quiet—that lasted two full weeks. Actually, that wasn't quite right, either, because with Kit being the kind of person she was—namely, disagreeable and loud—Pendleton's house was in no way peaceful, nor was it particularly quiet.

The two of them did, however, manage to maintain their sleeping habits, for what that was worth. Pendleton continued to sleep on the couch while Kit slumbered in the bedroom, and Maury divided his time between the two, a bond that afforded them some kind of connection. Sort of, at any rate. In a way. At least, they were linked in spirit. Or maybe thought. Or perhaps awareness.

Yes, awareness. That was it. Because whatever else was going on the house, however indefinable, Pendleton and Kit were certainly
aware
of each other's presence there.

As he soaped up in his shower, Pendleton congratulated himself on finally pinning down a definition—however vague—of his relationship with Kit since that mutual baring of souls two weeks earlier. Yep, by golly, that was it. Awareness. Deep, abiding awareness.

In fact, he was aware of her the moment he woke up every morning, because she had adopted the rather unfortunate habit of rising early to cook him breakfast before he went to work. And not his usual Wheaties with skim milk and bananas, either. No, Kit had insisted that since he was living in
Kentucky
now, Pendleton should start eating like a Kentuckian. And to her, that meant sausage, eggs, and biscuits dripping with butter.

He fared little better upon his return home in the evening, because she cooked dinner for him, too, usually something with pork. Or pork fat. Or pork rinds. Or pork bones. She even prepared vegetables by throwing them into a pot with a big ol' hamhock and boiling them within an inch of their lives. Just like her mama had done, and her mama's mama had done before that. Kit's mother had been a country girl at heart, and had made sure her daughter knew how to please a man in the kitchen. A man who liked pork, at any rate. Pendleton, however, preferred poultry.

He still hadn't quite figured out what Kit did during the day while he was at work. Aside from prowling the city in her celebrated Mercedes S-class, in a quest to find things that would really annoy him. Things like, oh … a concrete garden gnome for the front yard—which he had
immediately
exiled to the back—or lace curtains for the front windows—which he simply tried his best to ignore—or more of those intolerable Bill Monroe CDs—which he refused to admit were starting to grow on him in spite of the proliferation of banjos.

Just as Pendleton was rinsing his hair, the steamy stream of hot water spurting from the faucet suddenly went arctic cold, and he yelped at the shock of it. "Dammit," he hissed as he leaped away from the icy cascade.

Blindly, because he still had soap in his eyes, he fumbled to turn the water off, then snatched a towel from the rack, and stepped out into the quickly dissipating steam. As he jerked his robe from the back of the bathroom door, he heard the unmistakable sound of water running elsewhere in the house, and he realized that it was Kit who was the culprit behind his sabotaged shower.

He had told her and told her and
told
her about the temperamental plumbing in the old building, had warned her and warned her and
warned
her that when someone was running the shower, the slightest trickle of water elsewhere in the house could potentially cause frostbite for the showerer. Of course, that was why she invariably chose
his
shower time to take
her
baths, he reminded himself. So that he would freeze his—

Assembling what little control he could, Pendleton scooped his wet hair from his forehead and made a decision, right there on the spot:
No more.
Kit had interrupted his leisurely Sunday morning shower for the last time. With a resolute cinching of his bathrobe belt, he exited the second-floor bathroom and proceeded to the one downstairs.

He was still dripping water and shivering enough to qualify for the puree setting on a blender when he rapped hard on the bathroom door. "Kit!" he called out over the rush of water on the other side, envisioning the steam that must be curling up from all the hot water running into the tub.

"What?" she called back.

"Are you decent?"

She didn't respond for a moment, then sang out, "Maybe. Maybe not. Do you feel lucky?"